On November 24th and 25th of 2014, the first EFLM Strategic Conference on 'Defining analytical performance goals 15 years after the Stockholm Conference on Quality Specifications in Laboratory Medicine' was held. The conference organizers released the official restructured hierarchy in 2015.

For all its ubiquity in the lab, proper QC isn't easy. Even though every laboratory has to perform Quality Control, that hasn't made the task any simpler. It still relies on the right mean, the right SD, the right control limits, the right rules and numbers of control measurements, and the right interpretation of control data points. If you get one part of this system wrong, it can throw off the correct implementation. Here's an example that was recently published showing the difficulties and challenges of performing proper QC.

An analysis of 4 different point-of-care (POC) analyzers and one POC device for HbA1c, based on a study published in 2012. The focus of the study was to find practical POC devices that could support faster decision making for the country's large HIV population. The question is, do any POC devices provide adequate quality for that type of clinical care?